The Sex Life of Books

We were mystified for years. Let me explain. When we moved into our apartment in Brooklyn ten years ago, we brought with us a few books from Jerusalem, where we were living most of the time. These were the novels we were reading, some volumes about New York City in the early 19th century for a history I was writing, a detailed map of Israel, another of Jerusalem, and a Hebrew-English dictionary.

Even then we were too old fashioned to look on line for the meaning, spelling, derivation, and synonyms of words, so we bought the two-volume Oxford English Dictionary. and of course, we could not exist without a Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, so we acquired that too. After a few months we returned to Jerusalem.

Several months later still, we flew back to Brooklyn. Much to our surprise, the few books we had left behind seemed to have multiplied. We were puzzled, but in the end we shrugged. We bought a large bookcase in which we installed the books that been here before, including the ones we had evidently forgotten. The bookshelves looked very nice, but they were relatively empty, a far cry from our overflowing bookcases in Jerusalem.

We stayed in this apartment for a few months before returning once again to Jerusalem. How many books could we have bought during that time? How many books could we have received as gifts? Not many, right? But when we came back to Brooklyn, we found more books in the bookcase than we had remembered. Again we were puzzled. Again we shrugged.

We traveled back and forth between Brooklyn and Jerusalem until two years ago, when we sold our apartment in Jerusalem and moved to Brooklyn permanently. In the past, we returned to Brooklyn, we found more books in the bookcase than we had left behind. We could chalk that up to faulty memory. But now that we were here all year round, our books continued to multiply. You're not going to tell me that from one day to the next we can't remember what's in our bookcase, are you? It's not as if it's never happened before. Ecclesiastes, written probably in the third century before the current era, warned us that "of making of many books there is no end."

After searching for the simplest possible solution, we finally figured it out. After we turn out the lights and go to bed, the books make love to one another, producing still more books. Histories beget histories, novels multiply novels, dictionaries spawn dictionaries, and biographies breed biographies. Propinquity on the shelf seems to be the operating principle for coupling, providing, as Shaw described marriage, maximum temptation with maximum opportunity. True, there are some unexplained productions, new progeny left on the steps of an orphanage, so to speak. A historical novel, for example, can't be explained by the closeness on a shelf of a history and a novel. But if we've put a book in the wrong place, as often happens, that mystery is solved as well.

The books are very discreet. More than once I've tried to catch them in the act. I'd creep into the living room at night and turn on the lights, yet never have I caught a pair in flagrante delicto. I decided at last to let them alone and to let nature take its course. Books, after all, will be books.